Committments with Gettup!

Akrasia
1

Hello!

Everybody knows that: your postponing tasks, don’t show up in the gym… So what could be the solution? An App for the iPhone I came across was some years ago: Gettup!
I think this was a Startup by two students from somewhere in North Germany. The idea was: You committ yourself to something (say go to the gym) and enter this to the App. You have to specify when (plus/minus half an hour) and where. At the appointment time the Smartphone checks your Location. If you miss the place and date the App will post on Facebook that you didn’t Show up!
For me it really worked. I committed two times the week in the gym. No Problem when it is next week or the week after! At the actual date I had all these excuses not to go. But with Gettup! I knew that all my friends on Facebook will know that I didn’t. What a blame. Then better go there.
Somehow the concept was not flying itself, the App disappeared.
So for a certain time without Gettup! I was completely lost in space and time. A lot of distractions everywhere. I saw on the Gizmag the Pavlok. Being buzzed when you do something wrong? Really? I could not belief this. But curiosity killed me and I read some of the posts from Maneesh Sethi. There I came across the “11 Apps that will Change your life”. And guess what: Beeminder was one of this.
First when I opened the page I thought: This could work? Well what can I say? I tried it an setup some Goals (not too much, otherwise I will derail too easily) and now I am blogging in this Forum (as you might have noticed, I am not american, nor english and this is my first blog; so forgive me!). The other Goals I setup will be reported in one of the next Posts.
I hope you like this post about Gettup!. If you have any comments, let me know.

Cheers, Chris

1 Like
2

Love it! Thanks for sharing. I moved that one to the graveyard section of our competitors roundup when it died. This is actually really funny timing because an hour before you posted this I was talking to Maneesh Sethi about what I’m dubbing the Sushi Competition Principle and this excerpt from your post is a perfect illustration of it:

PS: It was actually “Getupp” not “Gettup”.

1 Like
3

Hello,
You’re absolutely right. It’s Getupp! I remembered a double letter but which one?

Chris

4

Maybe a comment on the Getupp App: So good it was, it had one severe drawback. You had to commit for the gym say twice a week. So you choose tuesday and thursday and log in a time, say 19:30. What is when in the meanwhile you have a Business travel abroad which leaves you no Chance to satisfy the committed date? Then a post on Facebook appeared. But you are “innocent”. It would not help to go to the gym the day before. Once you send the commitment, it’s away and you cannot Change it any more.
With Beeminder it’s completely different. It doesn’t matter when you are planning to go to the gym, it’s your responsibility and of course flexibility.
I think that’s an important pro for Beeminder!

Chris

1 Like
5

:slight_smile: Yup, we are super proud of that aspect of Beeminder: http://blog.beeminder.com/flexbind

(Meta: You mentioned before about learning English. If it would be valuable, feel free to set one of your posts to wiki and I could take a copyediting pass.)